Our advice columnists have heard it all over the years—so today we’re diving into the archives of Care and Feeding to share classic parenting letters with our readers. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My son is a completely delightful 2-and-a-half-year-old—funny, inquisitive, smart, curious—but there’s one thing he does that I don’t know how to deal with.
First, his mother insists that he’s past the diaper stage and that we’ll deal with any waste disasters as they happen. I think she’s wrong about that, but I’m tired of arguing, so she wins by default. But whenever he wants to enter a room and the door is closed, he stands outside the door and pees on the floor. We usually don’t discover it until we leave the room and step in it. What’s worse, the times I’ve caught him in the act, he follows up his peeing by taking off his shoes and splashing around in it.
What do we do? (As I write this, I know the solution is “keep him in diapers for now.” But his mother is adamantly against that.) Are there any other solutions I’m not seeing?
—Not Singing in the Rain
Dear Not Singing,
You are right. Your wife is wrong. He’s not ready. You will have to have an argument about it. It’s OK! You’ll have lots of them. Get her to agree to wait six more months and then try again.
From: How Do I Tell My Mom I’m Not Having Kids? (October 18, 2019).
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Dear Care and Feeding,
My question, broadly, is about having a child with a very particular issue, and how to walk the line between being a vocal advocate and ally for others in their community without compromising my child’s privacy.
The details: I’m a mom of two, with my second child being just a few months old. We have a beautiful little baby who is intersex and healthy, and who is being raised as a boy for a lot of good reasons—though we recognize that his gender identity may end up being something else, which is fine and great! For that reason, my husband and I have decided against any kind of genital “normalizing” surgery for him. The issue is, thanks to all my frantic Googling and message boarding and scientific study–reading at the outset of this whole adventure, I now know that genital normalizing surgery on infants is even a thing, that it’s routinely pushed on scared parents who are just trying to do their best for their babies, and that intersex people in our society face a whole host of other issues most people have no idea about.
As a result, I kind of want to speak up about it. I want to be an ally, and I also want to help and support other parents out there who get a surprise at their ultrasound like we did, or who have doctors casually offering cosmetic surgery to move their infant’s urethra to a prettier location (yes, that’s a real thing that happened). I suppose I can be an ally without ever mentioning to anyone that I have an intersex child myself, but that seems weirdly cagey: “Why are you suddenly so interested in intersex rights advocacy?” “Oh, no reason!” Doing that would also feel like it had some undertones of shame, and I absolutely don’t think being intersex is some kind of shameful secret.
But on the other hand, this is about my child’s genitals! Which are for sure nobody’s business, and which people might otherwise have no idea are different but for me saying anything. Is the right thing to do here to quietly offer support without “outing” my child until he’s old enough to have a say? To loudly support but never say why? Something else?
—Secret Ally
Dear Secret Ally,
Your baby is very lucky to have you, and you are very lucky to have your baby. It is absolutely best not to operate on intersex kids to make them “look more one way than the other,” and the “tidying-up” policies of the past/present have resulted in a lot of deeply traumatized/sad/angry people who got a little older and found themselves to have been irreparably “tidied up” (often only after demanding their charts and discovering the truth). Parents have not been monsters to do so; they followed the best advice of their time and were told to go along with something the medical community believed would maximize the happiness of their patients. But we know better now, and ideally we will know even better in the future.
You are correct that, depending on where you live, there are still plenty of surgeons offering to “normalize” infant genitals (as opposed to extremely necessary surgeries to allow free urine or menstrual passage, amongst others). The rate of intersex births is also much higher than you would think, and also there are numerous types of intersex conditions that require very different forms of treatment or no treatment at all. I do not know which condition your baby possesses, and I do not need to. I hope you are now happy with your baby’s medical team.
I think there are going to be two phases in your advocacy. One is while your child is a minor, and it can be supporting and encouraging others on those same forums, using a pseudonym, writing pseudonymous essays, and uplifting and promoting intersex people’s voices and work. There’s so much you can do that isn’t a bumper sticker saying I HEART MY GENITALLY AMBIGUOUS CHILD, SAM.
When your child is ready to know their body is not like the majority of other bodies (you’ll want to talk to various professionals about best practices on that, and also you’ll want to be in private communication with school administrators to avoid things like the last vestiges of group showering, etc.), they may want to be a vocal advocate, or they may just want to be a dentist with ambiguous genitals who feels no need to talk about it. They may want to have a “prettier” urethra location! Listen to your child. Their privacy comes first.
I’m cheering for you both.
—N.C.
From: Is Giving Up Our Massive, Kid-Hating Dog the Only Option With a Baby on the Way? (January 24, 2020).
Dear Care and Feeding,
Our 4-year-old daughter has a playmate, “Luke.” Luke is our next-door neighbor and attends the same preschool she does. Luke’s mom has become one of my closest friends over the last few years—our families vacation together and spend holidays at each other’s houses, and our kids get along very well. Luke very recently developed an obsession with Star Wars. This otherwise chill, hilarious kid—whose mom is so anti-gun that she won’t allow water pistols in her house—has become a walking, talking encyclopedia of Anakin et al. He has seen all the movies multiple times and is constantly playing Star Wars on the playground and on play dates.
A couple of nights ago, we were all at Luke’s family’s house and while playing through an imaginary Star Wars scene in a different room from the one the adults were in, Luke told my daughter and another child that he was going to “kill them.” Our daughter freaked out and told us. Luke, sobbing, admitted saying it and was made to apologize; his mom told him it was never OK to say that—even in pretend play. We discussed it on the spot with our daughter and then again when we got home. But she has woken up the last few nights from nightmares and today she told us that she was afraid that “bad guys” are going to “shoot her.” When we asked what that means to her, she said, “Bad guys like Darth Vader are going to shoot me and kill me.” We told her (again) that none of that was real or going to happen.
My husband thinks I should talk to Luke’s mom, telling her that playing Star Wars has given our daughter nightmares, making it very clear that the kids can’t play that game anymore. I’m frustrated, too, because I would never expose my preschool-age kid to such violence and am upset that I have to deal with the repercussions of someone else’s parenting decisions. We’ve practiced with our daughter what she could say if Luke starts to play Star Wars again, and also how to walk away and find someone else to play with on the playground, but should I also speak to my friend? If so, what should I say? It’s bound to come up soon, because the kids play together every day at recess and see each other every weekend. I would love a script, if you have one!
—Don’t Shoot, She’s Only Four!
Dear DSSOF,
Listen, dealing with the repercussions of someone else’s parenting decisions is part of being a parent. I know it can be upsetting, but since we don’t get to control anything about how other people raise their children, all we can do is raise our own kids as best we can, giving them the necessary tools to deal with frightening and alarming stuff that will inevitably come their way. Helping your daughter with strategies to avoid future exposure to something that disturbs her and teaching her how to stand up for herself (and also how to walk away) are all essential.
I want to point out a few things here to help you keep perspective. One is that you are so lucky to enjoy the company of Luke’s parents! What are the odds that your kid befriends someone whose parents become people you’re close to? (Ask any parent: odds are not necessarily great.) This is a fantastic situation. Don’t let your appreciation of that out of your sight for a minute. You have years ahead of you of kid friendship situations where the parent-to-parent interactions are ones you’ll want to keep to a minimum. Just wait till she starts regular school.
Another thing is that, as parenting fails go, letting 4-year-old Luke become obsessed with Star Wars (though I’ll admit, I hate it too) is not so terrible. I mean, a lot of 4-year-olds are similarly obsessed. I am completely with you on avoiding exposing small children to violence, but it’s worth saying again that we don’t get to decide this sort of thing for other families. And that’s not a bad thing. It means our kids get practice, early, in dealing with unfamiliar, upsetting, even scary things. And we get a chance to talk to them about these things.
Also: at 4, it’s not unusual for a child to get “stuck” on a particular frightening idea or image. You never know what’s going to send your child down that path, either. I was sure my daughter would love the gorgeous children’s book by Arthur Yorinks, Louis the Fishsince she’d loved another book of his, Hey, Albut Louis gave her nightmares every night for many days. I tend to think these frightening ideas they become preoccupied with are early ways for them to work out their fears, and that what’s most important is how you respond to them, both in the moment and in an ongoing way.
Finally: that script. I would let it go. Let your daughter be the one to say, “I don’t want to play that game anymore.” It’ll be good for her. And it’ll be better in the long run for Luke to hear this from her than from his mother. (And telling her about the nightmares is only going to make her feel terrible, which I’m sure you don’t want.) If it turns out that your daughter can’t get Luke to let go of Star Wars when they play together, then I’d make a phone call. And all I’d say is, “I know how much Luke loves Star Warsbut it turns out that my kid really, really hates it and she’s having no luck getting him to switch gears. Do you think you could give her a hand with that? I would be really grateful.”
—Michelle Herman
From: My Daughter Has a Toxic Friendship. Should I Put an End to It? (January 5, 2020).
Classic Prudie
One of my good friends, “Chelsea,” has been dating a seemingly nice guy, “Larry,” for the past six months. They are both in their late 20s and Chelsea is very open about the possibility of settling down and starting a life with Larry. But through a shared acquaintance, I recently learned that while Larry was in college, he was accused of murdering his roommate.
